In the age of social sharing, people who work together know more and more about each other. In general, this is a good thing for peers and leaders. Research shows our brains respond positively to people when we feel a personal connection with them. We try harder, perform better, and are kinder to our colleagues. Command and control management is on its way out, and bosses who practice empathy and make an effort to connect with their subordinates are in.

This willingness in leaders to be open and honest, even if it makes them vulnerable, is important because it builds trust — people can easily sense inauthenticity. We tend to assume that leaders are marketing to us. If a leader never shows emotion, that conviction only becomes stronger. But when a leader reveals a more personal side to herself, and we sense that it is authentic, we feel a connection and are more likely to believe her words.

However, people who overdo this accomplish just the opposite and can end up completely undermining themselves. If leaders share information that suggests they are not up to the task — for example, “I’m scared, and I have no idea what to do right now” — there is a good chance their team will take on that same emotion, or worse, lose faith in their ability to lead. People in charge have to think longer and harder than the rest of us about when to be transparent because they have more eyes on them. Every time they are vulnerable (or are not vulnerable), their reports are watching and analyzing their words and actions for a deeper meaning. So, when does sharing become oversharing? We argue that the way to find a balance between the two is to be selectively vulnerable — or open up to your team while still prioritizing their boundaries, as well as your own.

This issue often presents itself when there are new initiatives or changes in an organization. We typically find leaders asking themselves how much of their own worries they should reveal when leading their team down a challenging or unfamiliar road. The best leaders are honest about how they feel while simultaneously presenting a clear path forward.

Below are some tips to help you do this:

Figure yourself out. The best leaders are able to hit a pause button when they become emotional. Instead of immediately acting, ask yourself, “What exactly am I feeling? Why? What is the need behind this emotion?” For example, an average manager might say she feels irritable about a project because the workload is annoying, but a great manager will take the time to reflect on this emotion. In doing so, she might realize the root cause of her irritability is anxiety about meeting a deadline.

Regulate your emotions. Once you identify your feelings, you need to know how to manage them. This is as important as managing your reports. What you consider a momentary bad mood can ruin someone’s day. Reactive, hot-tempered managers are hurtful, demoralizing, and the main reason people quit jobs. Research shows that employees confronted by an angry manager are less willing to work hard — especially if they don’t understand where the anger is coming from. But when managers control their words and body language during tense situations, their reports’ stress levels drop significantly. “An important part of being a leader is understanding how much weight the people around you can bear,” Laszlo Bock, founder and CEO of Humu, and former head of HR at Google, told us. “You can’t burden your employees with more than they can carry, or expect them to hold you up all the time.”

Address your feelings without becoming emotionally leaky. We’re often worse at hiding our feelings than we think. If you’re frustrated or upset, your employees will most likely pick up on your bad mood and might assume that they are responsible for it. “The idea that you’re never going to have a bad day as a boss is bullshit,” Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor, told us. “The best thing to do is to cop to it. Say to your team, ‘I’m having a bad day, and I’m trying my best not to take it out on you. But if it seems like I’m having a bad day, I am. But it’s not because of you that I’m having a bad day. The last thing I want is for my bad day make your day worse.” You don’t have to go into more detail, but acknowledging your feelings helps you avoid creating unnecessary anxiety among your reports.

Provide a path forward. When you’re tackling a challenging project, practice how you’re going to share your emotions with your team, and make sure you do so with intention. Dumping your feelings onto them in a reactive or unthoughtful way leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation. Aim to be realistic but optimistic. A good formula to follow is: “Because of ______, I’m feeling _____ and _____. But here’s what I’m planning to do next to make it better: _________. And here’s what I need from you: _______. What do you need from me?” This will help you address your anxiety without projecting negative emotions onto your team. “It’s a promise to work towards a solution in spite of emotions,” says Jerry Colonna, former venture capitalist and coach, also known as the “CEO Whisperer.”

Avoid oversharing. A good rule of thumb for figuring out if you’re about to overshare is to ask yourself: “How would I feel if my manager said this to me?” If it’s something that you’d be thankful to hear, chances are your reports will feel similarly. If it’s something that would give you pause, err on the side of caution. Be curious about your own intentions. Are you sharing from a place of authenticity, or are you trying to fabricate a connection with others? Sometimes we overshare personal experiences just to feel close with someone else. But often, this is not useful or effective.

Read the room. If you think members of your team might be feeling anxious about the project, it’s okay to surface those feelings to help them feel less isolated. For example, if everyone has been working long hours to meet an impending deadline, you might say something like, “I’m feeling a little tired today, but I’m grateful for how well we’ve worked together and that we’re set to send the client a proposal we can all be proud of.” Again, always try to pair realism with optimism, and share when you sense it will be helpful to others.

Finding the right balance between sharing and oversharing is not easy. But with practice, it can be done. As a leader, it’s your job to understand the powerful role your emotions play, and to harness them in ways that will help your team succeed.

Liz Fosslien will join Humu, a company that uses nudges to drive behavior change aimed at making work better, at the end of February, where she will be responsible for content. Most recently, she designed and facilitated organizational culture workshops for executives at LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, BlackRock, and Nike. Liz’s previous writing and data visualization has been featured by The Economist, CNN, Freakonomics, and NPR. Liz and Mollie are the authors of the book, No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work. Follow them on Twitter or Instagram @lizandmollie.

Mollie West Duffy is an organizational designer at global innovation firm IDEO. Mollie formerly worked as a research associate for the Dean of Harvard Business School Nitin Nohria and renowned strategy professor Michael E. Porter. She’s written for Fast Company, Quartz, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Entrepreneur, Quiet Rev and other digital outlets. Liz and Mollie are the authors of the book, No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work. Follow them on Twitter or Instagram @lizandmollie.

Not long ago, I received a call from an HR manager at a large corporation seeking an executive coach for one of their senior leaders. He was described as arrogant, tactlessly blunt, and lacking empathy. Despite his challenges, all of which hadn’t improved much despite several previous coaching interventions, the company hadn’t fired him because he was considered one of the industry’s most brilliant engineers, responsible for several of the firm’s most profitable patents. The company simply couldn’t afford to let him go.

How do you coach a leader whom others think is a hopeless case? Sometimes you can’t. The person may well turn out to be a jerk who won’t change their toxic ways. In that case, the company needs to fire the individual. Tolerating destructive behavior will send the signal that it’s ok to mistreat others as long as you get results. But, often, as was the case with my client, the leader who everyone thinks is hopeless is simply being misunderstood and their behavior misdiagnosed.

Whether you are a coach, an HR leader, or an executive trying to help a challenging subordinate, your credibility, and that of the leader you’re trying to help, depends on an accurate understanding of what’s actually going on. Here are three ways you can be sure you’re addressing the right problem with a challenging leader in the right way.

Manage your assumptions and judgements. Without realizing it, those of us in advisory roles often bring our own issues to our work helping others. We make assumptions and judgements based on our own experiences that often have little to do with the leader we’re trying to support. Before I even met this leader, I found myself feeling anxious, dismissive, and judgmental toward him based on what others had said. I imagined how I would respond to his insulting behavior and what I would say if he made an arrogant comment. But my defenses were unwarranted and my assumption that he was a jerk proved wrong. He was engaging, open to learning, and willing to accept his need to improve. When I asked him why he thought he was so harsh toward others, he seemed stumped and genuinely troubled by how others had characterized him.

I’d heard from the company’s HR manager that this executive was especially cruel toward one colleague. Why had he singled out one person to treat in a uniquely nasty way? As we explored this, it became clear that something about the younger engineer triggered the executive’s anger and it eventually clicked: The young engineer reminded him of his older brother, with whom he had a contentious relationship. My client was raised in an excessively achievement-oriented family, that prized blunt candor over tact, and he was regularly sent the message that he was inferior. His brother had been the family’s golden child while he was never good enough. This direct report was a daily reminder of that pain. This back story in no way excused his behavior, but it did explain it. More importantly, it revealed a path forward toward changing it. But I had to set aside my biases and prejudgments to build the trust necessary to access these important insights.

Look past symptoms to contradictions. Determining what lies beneath seemingly destructive behavior requires looking beyond symptoms. My client’s colleagues had described him as mean and insensitive. His previous coaches had focused on various interpersonal techniques, like how to give constructive feedback, work with different personality styles, and delegate effectively. But they’d neglected to probe into the dynamic with that one engineer. To thoroughly diagnose a leader’s behavior, look for breaks in patterns. Are there people this person works especially well or poorly with? Specific circumstances in which they shine or falter? No one is the same all the time, so understanding where people deviate from predictable habits can isolate important clues. In my client’s case, his unique contempt toward one colleague was an important data point. Further, I learned later that his widely regarded technical expertise coupled with his family background made him feel anxiously responsible for the company’s technical reputation. His team members experienced this as micromanagement and dismissive of their expertise. If we’d focused on those symptoms, we wouldn’t have gotten very far. We needed to understand the root cause. It’s not uncommon to inaccurately diagnosis bad leadership behavior. One Arizona State University study found that toxic leadership pathologies are often confused with behaviors that might fall into a normal range of pathology. To avoid confusing common leadership shortfalls with serious pathologies, it’s critical to dig deeper behind symptoms.

Have a broad repertoire of solutions. For many in advisory roles, their diagnostic lens is narrowed to problems they are best equipped to solve. Every hammer looks like a nail, as the saying goes. For example, I’ve seen some consultants whose specialty was team building, so it was no surprise that their findings and recommendations were all around improving team trust. Leadership coaches use their favorite personality instruments to solve everything from poor financial performance to low morale. It’s important to be open-minded to solutions that fall outside your expertise. Ineffective leadership behavior can originate from deep-seated pathologies to problems with organizational culture. Having a repertoire of tools and approaches helps avoid the dangers of applying a one-size-fits-all solution to all situations. And don’t be afraid to refer people to others who have different expertise that may be able to better help your clients with particular issues. In the case of my client, I recommended he also see a therapist to work on his anxiety and unresolved family issues. He and I worked on more effective ways to engage, teach, and empower his team, and how to recognize when his triggers were getting in the way of doing so.

Consistent scholarly research suggests when it comes to empirically measuring the effectiveness of those advising leaders, we fall far short. Mislabeling behavior or a person as beyond help is one way we fail leaders. If you don’t look for contradictions, get to the root cause, and have a range of solutions, you could unwittingly limit someone’s growth or, even worse, derail their career. But if you do those things, with an open mind, you may be able to help save the job of a valuable leader who might otherwise have been let go, and in turn, provide great value to those you serve.

Ron Carucci is co-founder and managing partner at Navalent, working with CEOs and executives pursuing transformational change for their organizations, leaders, and industries. He is the best-selling author of eight books, including the recent Amazon #1 Rising to Power. Connect with him on Twitter at @RonCarucci; download his free e-book on Leading Transformation.

It’s a dreadful moment when a well-liked member of your team tenders their resignation. You experience a cocktail of emotions ranging from fear about how the rest of the team will react, to frustration at having to add recruiting to your already hectic calendar. The worst is the lingering feeling of being rejected. As with most difficult situations as a manager, how you handle the resignation will affect more than just you. How you respond will influence whether the person’s departure becomes a typical bump in the road or the inflection point to a downward trend for your team.

Before sharing the news with anyone, take some time to consider your response carefully. This allows you to grapple with your own reactions before you’re forced to manage those of your team members. If you move too quickly and try to communicate a positive message while harboring anxiety, frustration, or bitterness, those potent emotions will show through in your body language. When your words are positive but your body language telegraphs concern, your team will notice the incongruence and infer your intent from what you’re showing rather than what you’re saying.

Once you’ve reflected on your own reaction, you can work through a process that will minimize the damage of a well-liked team member resigning.

Start by helping everyone celebrate the person who is leaving. It’s understandable if you feel like downplaying the person’s departure, in hopes that no one will notice. It just isn’t likely to work. Losing a well-liked colleague will create concern and even grief for your team and invalidating that grief removes an important part of the process. Letting the person slip out the door unheralded will suggest that you don’t care. Don’t make the mistake of minimizing the moment.

Instead, be at the front of the “we’ll miss you” parade. Throw a party to wish the person well. Say a few words about some of the great things the person contributed to the team. Laugh about inside jokes and shared experiences because, as you do, you’ll not only make the person who’s leaving feel good about your team, you’ll strengthen the bond among the people who remain.

Recalling these stories will also put a smile on your face, which is much better than the look of terror that might be associated with your inner voice that’s saying, “What will we do without her?” or “What if others start to follow suit?” That face will only make your team more nervous when they’re looking to you for reassurance. Your words and body language should convey that it’s normal and natural for people to move on.

Once you’ve thrown the party the person deserves, ask them for a favor in return — their candor about what you need to learn from their departure. Even if your organization has a formal third-party exit interview process, conduct your own interview. Ask the person to be honest with you as part of the legacy they can leave in making you and the team better in the future. Prepare your questions carefully and get ready to take the lumps.

You’ll need to have good questions and follow-up prompts to get past the pat answers such as “I was offered higher compensation” and “It’s an opportunity I couldn’t refuse.” You need to identify what factors contributed to the person taking the call from the recruiter in the first place. You can make these questions less pointed by asking, “What advice would you give me to prevent another great person like you from taking a call from a recruiter?” “What do I need to know that people aren’t telling me?” “How could I improve the experience of working here?” By making the questions more generic and less personal, the departing employee might feel more inclined to share any uncomfortable truth.

You can also seek feedback about things beyond your control, such as, “What other messages does the company need to hear?” “What factors would contribute to a better experience here?” Throughout the discussion, your emphasis should be on asking great questions. Do as little talking as possible and instead, listen carefully and objectively.

After the exit interview, your head will be full of powerful, sometimes conflicting thoughts and feelings. Give yourself a night to sleep on it and then start the process of putting your insights into action. First, lean into the uncomfortable conversations. Whether one-on-one or in team meetings, dig into any themes that have merit. Share your hypotheses and ask people to clarify, refine, validate, or challenge how you’re thinking.

For example, you could say, “I’m coming to understand that the biggest problem is not the workload, but the lack of focus. What do you think? Is it true, false, or only half the picture?” This process of generating and testing hypotheses will not only help you make the most targeted changes, it will also help you strengthen the connection with your remaining team members.

As you listen to their responses, go beneath the facts and information they’re sharing with you and watch and listen for what they are feeling and what they value. Where does their language become stronger (e.g., “we always do this,” or “never do that”), suggesting that they are frustrated or angry. Where does it become weaker (e.g., “I guess we…, or “I thinksometimes we might”), hinting that they might feel hesitant or powerless. What is their body language telling you? When you spot an emotional reaction, ask a few more questions to understand what’s beneath their feelings.

Through all of these conversations, try to discern whether one great person resigning was a single point or the start of a pattern. Be open about what you can do differently and advocate for the changes from other stakeholders that will make your team a better one to work on.

The insights you glean from conducting your own exit interview and testing your hypotheses will be valuable, but don’t lose sight of the most important ways that you contribute to the morale of your team — by positioning them to do meaningful work. Double down on the management essentials. Make sure everyone is clear on your expectations, especially on the highest (and lowest) priorities for the team. Have frank conversations to ensure people feel like they have the requisite skills and resources to do their jobs well. And pay more attention to the feedback, coaching, and celebrations that will motivate them and keep them engaged.

If there was a problem on your team you were unaware of (or trying to ignore) it might take losing a well-liked employee for you to recognize the severity of the issue. Work through your emotions and then start a virtuous cycle by celebrating the departing employee, seeking their candid feedback in an exit interview, forming and testing hypotheses about how to improve your workplace, and making meaningful changes that make your team feel heard and valued. Losing one team member might end up being a relatively low price to pay if it leads to better morale all around.

Liane Davey is the cofounder of 3COze Inc. She is the author of You First: Inspire Your Team to Grow Up, Get Along, and Get Stuff Done and a coauthor of Leadership Solutions: The Pathway to Bridge the Leadership Gap. Follow her on Twitter at @LianeDavey.

How do I know? When he left one company to join another, many in his top team followed him to the new company because they wanted to keep working for him. That’s a pretty strong testimonial.

“Yes, he pushes us hard,” one of his direct reports told me, “but I work harder and I deliver. I like that.”

But every leader — even strong ones — have their challenges. And while Robert (not his real name) inspires hard work and loyalty, he also inspires fear, especially in people who don’t know him well or are a few levels below him in the hierarchy. To be clear, Robert is not abusive. He simply has a high bar and is respectfully intolerant of mediocrity. But the impact is one of fear. More than once, a member of his team has come to me with great ideas that they have not shared with him.

Fear doesn’t bring out the best in people. It mutes their performance as they take fewer risks and make overly conservative, safe choices. It also befuddles them, sending them down a confidence-sapping negative spiral: They speak nervously, which makes them appear unsure, which creates doubt in their leaders, who question them more aggressively, which increases their nervousness, which befuddles them even more…and it’s all downhill from there.

On the one hand, this is not Robert’s problem — it’s the problem of the insecure employee. People need to build the confidence to engage with leaders who have an incisive mind and high expectations.

On the other hand, it is Robert’s problem. If he wants to get the most out of all his employees (and their teams), he needs to create a safe environment in which they can perform their best.

As an executive coach of high-performing leaders, I see this all the time. And here are two mistakes coaches often make when trying to help these leaders.

The coach accepts the leader’s perspective that it’s not his problem, that it’s the problem of the people with too delicate a constitution. They shouldn’t quiver in their boots under a legitimate line of questioning. He may be right about them, but he’s not right that it’s not his problem. As a leader who wants to get the best out of his people, it’s always his problem.

The coach tries to help the leader tone down his approach so that he’s not so scary. This is a bad idea. Why? First, most leaders are right that their questions are legitimate. Second, muting the leader is an exercise in frustration and is unsustainable. Third, even if that works, performance suffers anyway since the leader is no longer holding people to the high standard they ultimately need and want. In other words, the leader ends up replacing high performance with mediocrity. And for high-performing leaders (and their organizations), that’s unsustainable.

So what’s the solution?

Imagine you make a soup and it tastes too bitter. The soup is made; you can’t remove the bitter taste. But you can add some sugar to it that balances out the bitterness and makes the soup far more palatable. In other words, sometimes it’s not about changing or taking out an ingredient; it’s about adding one that’s missing.

Instead of reducing his incisiveness, Robert should increase his warmth.

He can acknowledge a person’s insights before asking his questions. Or he can thank them for bringing something to his awareness that was missing (which has the added benefit of showing his vulnerability). He can add a few words of support. He can simply connect with the person warmly and with a smile. He can give context to his questions so that everyone can learn about the way he thinks.

We all have attributes that simultaneously work for us and against us. The solution is not to subdue our strengths but to add ingredients that balance them out. In other words, build complementary skills.

If you have the opposite problem of Robert? If you hold people with care and comfort but tend not to push them? Don’t reduce your warmth — rather push yourself to ask a hard question, without losing your warmth.

Recently someone I work with was accused (by more than one person) of being too political. Her role required that she be adept at managing the politics of the most senior leaders of the organization, so dulling this trait would have been counterproductive.

“Your problem isn’t that you’re too political,” I suggested. “It’s that you’re not communicative enough with your colleagues at your level.” I coached her to continue to leverage her diplomatic skills, while including her team in her efforts instead of working around them.

As for Robert? “Don’t dilute your greatness,” I told him. “Let’s just build a container for it.”

An all-star team is making headway with a new initiative that could alter the future of the organization. Spirits are optimistic and the team is successfully maneuvering through new, yet very promising, territory. Then, the results begin taking longer than anticipated to prove, and after too much time spent outside of their comfort zones, the team of high-achieving employees can’t seem to execute within the uncertain environment.

The team’s outlook shifts and it becomes clear that the group will not be able to weather the storm of uncertainty needed to realize this new organizational opportunity.

How could such a capable team fail?

At the heart of many organizations is a deeper problem that blocks transformation: product/function organizational structure. This structure works in well-understood environments, where maximizing delivery of a product or service is the goal, but transformative projects require the organization to return to a more malleable state. This challenge requires teams that are formed through a re-matching of resources and employee capabilities.

Transformation-capable teams are made up of people who are not only high performers, but who hold a unique balance of skills and mindsets that allow them to sustain focus, agility, and optimism in the face of uncertainty for prolonged periods of time. Ultimately, not all top-performing employees are equipped for this.

Negative capability: being comfortable with uncertainty

The term “negative capability” was coined by the poet John Keats while describing writers like Shakespeare who were able to work within uncertainty and doubt. Keats was describing the ability to accept not having an immediate answer and to remain willing to explore how something may evolve before there is a clear outcome.

In the modern context, negative capability can be thought of as the ability to be comfortable with uncertainty, even to entertain it, rather than to become so anxious by its presence that you have to prematurely race to a more certain, yet suboptimal, conclusion. Whereas many people cannot stand the fuzziness of uncertainty, those who demonstrate negative capabilities can facilitate the exploration of new terrain and the discovery of an adjacent possible opportunity.

Individuals with negative capability remain curious and focused even when your project is far from the end goal. Chances are, they will even find this point of the project enthralling, rather than overwhelming, which is exactly what you want. They will also be able to suspend judgement about an end result and stay open to many possible outcomes, rather than become fixed early on to one version of success.

Chaos pilots: leading and executing in unfamiliar territory

In 1991, Danish politician and social worker Uffe Elbæk took out a $100,000 personal loan to open an unusual business school called Kaospilot. The vision of the business school was inspired by a previous project of Elbæk’s, where he observed a new skill set in students for navigating uncertain problems and saw the opportunity to teach these skills to business leaders who needed to do the same. Chaos pilot is a perfect label for a specific persona needed on a transformative team.

Chaos pilots are people who can creatively lead a project through uncertainty. They have negative capability, but they also have other critical skills, such as the ability to create structure within chaos and take action. Leaders who are chaos pilots are able to drive a team forward on a project even as the environment around them fluctuates.

Although it may sound glamorous to be such a person, being a chaos pilot is hard — they are the colleagues working on ambiguous projects and frequently getting beat up in the process. People who aren’t capable of being chaos pilots quickly flounder when the environment around the project gets shaky.

Chaos pilots often care more about creating meaningful change than about climbing a corporate ladder or getting another star on their charts. Finding chaos pilots to join you can be challenging and requires observation and experimentation, though there are a few fertile places to look for good candidates.

For example, look for people who are getting mixed performance reviews, but who are still highly prized by the organization. Often, these people are getting mixed reviews because they make those around them uncomfortable — because the potential candidates often challenge the status quo — but they continue to succeed, because they perform so well.

Divergent thinking, convergent action, and influential communication

Finally, there are three neuropsychological traits to seek while building a transformative team. These three traits — divergent thinking, convergent action, and influential communication — all play a crucial role to succeeding in innovation and transformation. While many individuals hold one or two of these skills, finding a person with all three is more challenging, yet optimal.

The first of the three, divergent thinking, is the ability to uniquely connect new information, ideas, and concepts that are usually held far apart. People with this skill can match dissimilar concepts in novel and meaningful ways and uncover new opportunities that others may overlooked.

Convergent action, the second trait, is the ability to execute on these new ideas in order to create something tangible. Though many people can come up with great ideas, it is often those with convergent action who will move that new concept from idea to product. Last, having the ability to communicate ideas in a coherent, compelling, and influential way is paramount. This trait will inspire other leaders and decision-makers to believe, support, and act on a novel idea or opportunity.

Similar to how many transformative business opportunities are found in unlikely places, the same is true about where you may find the best-suited team members to drive forward a promising new initiative.

Each organizational project represents a moment of potential transformation, and each successful project helps an organization self-correct away from becoming a calloused machine executing on routine, and instead become what they need to survive: a malleable organization capable of capturing new opportunities.

We all have life events that distract us from work from time to time — an ailing family member, a divorce, the death of a friend. You can’t expect someone to be at their best at such times. But as a manager what can you expect? How can you support the person to take care of themselves emotionally while also making sure they are doing their work (or as much of it as they are able to)?

What the Experts SayManaging an employee who is going through a stressful period is “one of the real challenges all bosses face,” says Linda Hill, professor at Harvard Business School and author of Being the Boss. Most of us try to keep work and home separate, but “we all have situations in which our personal and professional lives collide,” and how you handle these situations with your employees is often a test of your leadership. You need to be empathetic and compassionate while also being professional and keeping your team productive. It’s a fine line to maintain, says Annie McKee, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and author of How to Be Happy at Work.Here’s how to manage an employee going through a personal crisis.

Make yourself available“People don’t always feel comfortable telling their boss” that a parent is gravely ill or that they feel stressed out in the wake of a crumbling relationship, says McKee. They may be too overwhelmed, or embarrassed that it is causing them to be late repeatedly or to miss deadlines. Often a manager’s first challenge is simply recognizing the warning signs that an employee is going through a difficult time. Invest time in building good relationships with employees so you’ll be able to detect any problems early on. If you maintain an atmosphere of compassion in the office, people are more likely to proactively come to you when they’re going through a tough period.

Don’t pryAs a leader, you need to be able to show empathy and care, but you also must avoid becoming an employee’s personal confidante. After all, your job as manager is not to be the office shrink. So don’t ask a bunch of questions about the employee’s problems. As the person with more power in the relationship, the employee may feel compelled to tell you more than they’re comfortable with. “You want to build a caring relationship with employees, not a friendly relationship,” says Hill. Many managers make the mistake of confusing being liked with being trusted or respected. A good manager “has the ability to read and understand other people’s needs and concerns,” says McKee, while still keeping everyone focused on the major task at hand: accomplishing work.

Listen first, suggest secondWhen you speak to an employee about their current struggles, “listen first instead of immediately advocating for some particular course of action,” says Hill. They may just want a sounding board about the difficulties of caring for a sick relative or an opportunity to explain why a divorce has affected their attention span. If you immediately suggest they take a leave of absence or adjust their schedule, they may be put off if that’s not what they were thinking. Instead, ask what both of you can do together to address the issue of performance during the difficult period. “Try to use the word ‘we,’” advises Hill, as in “How can we support you?” The employee may have an idea for a temporary arrangement — some time off, handing off a project to a colleague, or a more flexible schedule for a few weeks — that is amenable to you.

Know what you can offerYou may be more than willing to give a grieving employee several weeks of leave, or to offer a woman with a high-risk pregnancy the ability to work from home. But the decision isn’t always yours to make. “You may be very compassionate but you may be in a company where that’s not the way it works,” says Hill. Of course, if you have the leeway to get creative with a flexible schedule, an adjusted workload, or a temporary work-from-home arrangement, do what you think is best. But also be sure you understand your company’s restrictions on short- and long-term leave, and what, if any, bureaucratic hurdles exist before promising anything to your employee. Explain that you need to check what’s possible before you both commit to an arrangement.

If the employee needs counseling or drug or alcohol services, there may be resources provided by your company’s medical insurance that you can recommend. But investigate the quality of those resources first. “The last thing you want to do is send a suffering employee to avail themselves of a program or supposedly helpful people who then fall short,” says McKee.

Check in regularly to make sure they’re doing ok Whether you’ve settled on a solution yet or not, check in with your employee occasionally by dropping by their desk (keeping their privacy in mind) or sending a brief email. Not only will your employee appreciate that you care, you’ll get a better sense of how they are coping. “You can simply ask, ‘Do you feel like you’ve got a handle on it?,’” says Hill. “And if they do, you can say, ‘Let’s just keep in touch so neither one of us has too many surprises. Or if you get a little over your head, I hope you’ll feel free to come to me and we can do some more problem solving and make further adjustments if necessary.’”

Consider workloadYou also have to consider whether prolonged absences will adversely affect clients or team members. If so, mitigate those risks by easing the person’s workload. If there are people who are willing and able to take on some of the individual’s projects, you can do that temporarily. Just be sure to reward the people who are stepping in. And then set timelines for any adjustments you make. If the person knows that their situation will last for 6-8 weeks, set a deadline for you to meet and discuss what will happen next. Of course, many situations will be open-ended and in those cases, you can set interim deadlines when you get together to check in on how things are going and make adjustments as necessary. Whatever arrangements you make, be crystal clear about your expectations during this time period. Be realistic about what they can accomplish and set goals they can meet. “For this to be useful,” says McKee, “it’s got to be specific and it has be grounded in reality.”

Be transparent and consistentBe conscious of the fact that other employees will take note of how you treat the struggling colleague and will likely expect similar consideration if they too run into difficult times in the future. “If you want to get productive work out of people, they need to trust you and believe that you’ll treat them fairly,” says Hill. Remember that policies may be precedent-setting. Every situation will be unique, but you want to be comfortable with policies in case you are called to apply them again. Keep in mind that solutions could apply to “the next person and the next and the next after that,” says McKee.

Principles to Remember

Do:

Set a tone of compassion in the office. It will not only give your employees confidence to approach you with struggles, but also give you the ability to spot warnings signs.

Be creative with solutions. A flexible schedule may allow a person to maintain their output without much disruption.

Check in from time to time, both to reassure the employee and to make sure that further adjustments or accommodations aren’t needed.

Don’t:

Act more like a therapist than a manager. Your heart may be in the right place, but don’t get involved in your employee’s personal problems.

Make promises you can’t keep. Research your company’s policies before you offer time off or alternative work arrangements.

Treat similar situations among employees differently. Employees will note — and resent — the inconsistency.

Case Study #1: Set realistic work goals with the employee and delegate some of their workAlicia Shankland, a senior HR executive with more than 20 years of experience, managed two different women through the intensely stressful, emotional months of fertility treatment. In both cases, the treatments continued for nearly a year, so the women were away from work frequently for medical appointments and procedures. They also experienced severe ups and downs from the hormone drugs and the emotional devastation of miscarriages.

What’s more, the schedule of fertility treatments didn’t fit neatly into any of the existing standard HR leave policies. “There was no way to make a 30-60-90 day plan to accommodate all the unknowns,” Shankland said.

In each case, she endeavored to make as many allowances as possible, and the women used sick time, flex time, and personal days. She worked with each of them to set concrete, realistic work goals that allowed them to focus on the most critical deliverables while delegating other duties, and teammates pitched in to make sure duties weren’t neglected or dropped. “We managed through it as a tight-knit team,” she says.

A happy outcome was that the team was well prepared to cover for the maternity leaves that were eventually taken by each woman. “It actually showed us all that we could play multiple roles,” Shankland says. When the women returned from their respective maternity leaves, they were both at “110 percent.” Each had “exceptionally successful years at the company that more than made up for the time when they needed extra hands to make it through.”

Case Study #2: Act with compassion and offer flexibility if possibleWhen David*, a professional at a financial services firm, heard that the husband of one of his team members had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, he knew it was going to be a long and emotional roller coaster for her. Within weeks of the initial, grave diagnosis, doctors suggested that the cancer may not be spreading as fast as initially thought, and that the husband may have months to live, rather than mere weeks. That did little to lessen the emotional devastation. “It was so difficult to predict,” he said. It’s such an emotional time, and “you can’t ask for a timeframe. She wants to have a diagnosis and she wants to be able to maintain a regular work schedule. But she just doesn’t know.” From a manager’s standpoint, he said, “you have to take that burden off the employee.”

David recognized that it would be better to offer the woman more flexibility, a shift she happily embraced. The management team restructured her job away from her responsibilities in client services, which demanded high close rates and availability, to duties that weren’t as time sensitive. “This provided our team with less reliance on her and also gave her the freedom to focus on her important family matters that were the priority,” he said. She also agreed to switch her compensation from salaried to hourly, which allowed the firm the flexibility to carry on the arrangement indefinitely.

Ten months after the diagnosis, she was still with the company in the modified arrangement. “You have to act with compassion,” said David, “while also being responsible to clients and other employees.” Critical to the firm’s success? Making sure they could continue to be flexible. “Sometimes you just don’t know how a situation will end,” David said. “You need to keep an open mind.”

*Not his real name.

Carolyn O’Hara is a writer and editor based in New York City. She’s worked at The Week, PBS NewsHour, and Foreign Policy. Follow her on Twitter at @carolynohara1.

Having a great boss is a potentially life-changing gift. On the other hand, many of us know firsthand that having a bad boss can cause a lot of drama, headaches, and stress. While it’s easy to love the great bosses and flee the bad ones, there’s one kind of boss that’s much less straightforward to navigate: the boss who doesn’t advocate for you.

You might not even know that you have one. Most advocacy happens behind the scenes and in conversations to which you yourself are not privy. As the adage goes, 80% of what’s said about you is said when you’re not in the room. Non-advocating bosses can refuse to bring up your name favorably in the promotion conversation. They can withhold critical developmental feedback and stunt your growth. And they can even overtly undermine you and attempt to sabotage your long-term career prospects.

When you discover you have a boss who isn’t advocating for you, the knee-jerk reaction is often to advocate for yourself and become your own PR machine. That’s often a mistake. Too much blatant self-promotion in the workplace can backfire and signal that you are narcissistic, egotistical, and ultimately unconcerned about the greater good. You ideally want others tooting your horn for you. Before taking action to close this critical advocacy gap, you’ll want to understand why your boss isn’t advocating for you.

First, consider the possibility that you are actually the problem. In other words, you may not have a bad boss — you just might not have developed enough or demonstrated the skill necessary for the boss to advocate for your advancement yet. Observe the characteristics and accomplishments of the rising stars around you to see where you might improve. Proactively solicit the gift of your boss’s feedback and ask what it would take to earn their advocacy. And perhaps consider getting a coach to help you make the improvements necessary to earn your manager’s advocacy. Seeking and applying your boss’s advice could potentially move them to advocate on your behalf.

When I first started teaching at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, I met with the dean to find out her expectations. I wanted to understand her perspective on what excellence looks like in my role so I could be intentional about my professional growth. Having these conversations early on with your boss can guide your goal-setting and position you to advance. Without this type of feedback, you might be falling short of your boss’s expectations for promotability and not even know it.

Assuming your performance is strong — and ideally, exceeds expectations — if your boss isn’t advocating for you, the issue likely lies with your boss. While it may not necessarily be your fault, it is your problem. You owe it to yourself to find a workable strategy to advance your career. Here are three steps you can take to navigate the advocacy gap.

Release your boss from your unmet expectations for advocacy. As unfair and frustrating as it seems when your boss doesn’t advocate for you, it’s in your best interest not to take it personally. There are countless possible reasons why your boss isn’t advocating for you. Your boss might be insecure and see you as competition. Your boss may suffer from deep unconscious biases that lead to unfair evaluations of your performance and suitability for bigger roles. Perhaps your boss is trying to advocate for you but lacks the social capital and credibility to successfully advocate for anyone. Or, perhaps your boss may simply not want to be your champion. Whatever the reason may be for the advocacy gap, forcing, manipulating, or shaming someone into being your advocate won’t work. Let go of whatever anger or hurt you have developed because of your boss.

Find another advocate. Ideally, you would have a direct supervisor going to bat for you from the get-go, but your boss isn’t the only person in the organization who can advocate for you. There are other influencers who can give you the boost you need. To navigate your advocacy gap, you want to identify and win the support of executive sponsors. The ideal sponsor is a powerful, high-ranking ally within your organization who will bring up your name with the right people at the right time so that you gain access to opportunity. Your sponsor is your champion in the organization — and sometimes even beyond it.

Many people confuse mentors with sponsors. In short, mentors counsel you, sponsors accelerate you. You don’t want to be over-mentored and under-sponsored. This is particularly important for women and people of color for whom, research shows, hard work alone is usually not enough to get noticed.

Sponsors typically choose their protégés. So, you’ll want to strategically increase your visibility to gain their interest instead of explicitly soliciting their advocacy. For one, produce consistently excellent work. Raise your hand to participate in organization-wide task forces and cross-functional teams. By adding value to important strategic projects for the organization, you’ll build your skillset, add to your experiences, and interact with new people. That way you can develop a reputation for being a reliable, growth-minded leader who is focused on the organization’s objectives. Make it clear that it’s in the organization’s best interest to retain and advance you.

Build your network inside and outside of the organization. The plain truth is that the best leaders have what I call 360° advocacy — that is, advocacy from those above them, those beside them (peers), and their direct reports. Don’t underestimate the value of your peers and your direct reports in bringing your name up and speaking well of you. Being good to people and doing the right thing by people — especially those who may lack formal power in your organization — can cause them to want to advocate on your behalf. Finally, being an engaged citizen beyond your workplace in your industry or your community can help as well. You never know who is connected to whom and how. Sometimes, generating positive buzz beyond the workplace can prompt your organization to take stock of how great an asset you are.

We all need champions who are willing to advocate for us when we cannot speak for ourselves. And when your boss doesn’t do it, it can be downright challenging. But it doesn’t have to stop your progress and career advancement. You could be just one project, one committee, or one conversation away from getting noticed for who you are, what you do, and your potential to achieve even more.

Nicholas Pearce is a clinical associate professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He’s also the CEO of The Vocati Group, a global executive consultancy. Follow him on Twitter @napphd.

CEOs in a recent poll agreed that creativity is the most important skill a leader can have. What seems less clear is how to actually cultivate it. Every leader is hoping for that next great idea, yet many executives still treat creative thinking as antithetical to productivity and control. Indeed, 80% of American and British workers feel pressured into being productive rather than creative.

Leaders can’t afford to have people holding back potential breakthroughs. Knowing this, it is important to recognize that radical, disruptive thinking is not something that can be mandated. Too many leaders try to demand creativity on the spot: They offer cash rewards for new ideas, sequester teams in endless brainstorming sessions, and encourage competitive hierarchies that reward some people for out-innovating others. While all of these strategies are intended to manifest organizational creativity, none do— and they often backfire.

As Teresa Amabile and Mukti Khaire explain, “One doesn’t manage creativity. One manages for creativity.” Your role as a leader is to create a working environment in which critical thinking, new ideas, and creative solutions can flow unencumbered. Here are a few guidelines for bringing out your team’s creative best.

Define creativity for your organization without making it a formula. Tom Stillwell, CEO of the Clio Award–winning marketing agency Midnight Oil, explains: “Creativity can be very expensive if you aren’t careful. You could dive into work without clarity on what creativity you want, and end up churning time, energy, and money without results.”

So the first step is to define your terms. If you treat concepts like “design thinking” and “disruptive innovation” as mere buzzwords rather than as muscular strategic concepts, you will end up spinning your wheels, and maybe even stifling creativity.

To create growth, idea creation must be directed toward the benefit of the organization and the customers it serves, something that can only happen through a shared clarity on what creativity means and the purpose it serves to differentiate you from competitors. Take care not to overextend that clarity into a rote formula. Too many R&D groups, with the noble intention of creating “innovative efficiency,” try to codify their innovation processes with such precision that they neuter imagination. A clear definition of the role creativity plays in executing your strategy should get everyone on the same page, ensuring that the entire organization is working toward shared goals.

Strike a balance between art and commerce. In a company, creative thinking must occur on a spectrum between art and commerce. New ideas that exist purely in the realm of art, or creativity for creativity’s sake, won’t necessarily drive the organization forward. And ideas that are singularly focused on commerce or profit aren’t likely to break free from the status quo. To strike a meaningful balance, it is vital that everyone on your team understands the spectrum and uses it in shaping their creative thinking. Whereas some people will have a hard time breaking free from financial assumptions, others will feel constrained by the need to anchor their creative expression to commercial realities. Manage this tension by encouraging people to move out of their comfort zones and toward the center of the spectrum. Effective leaders help their people understand this not as a contradiction but as a healthy tension that can yield the most profitable and breakthrough ideas.

Provide space for both collaborative and individual expression. Too often, we think of creativity as an individual pursuit. However, the Latin roots of the word “creative” — which describe a social, communal experience — reveal a fundamental truth: Creativity is founded upon collaboration. Julien Jarreau, executive creative director at the premier health marketing agency Health4Brands, elaborates:

“Individuality plays an important part in what people bring to the creative table. And yet relinquishing that individuality to a greater collective effort is the ultimate work of generating powerful creative results. I am clear in my expectations that I want collective creation while still honoring individuals. I don’t tolerate prima donnas.” People must learn to derive gratification as individual contributors, while balancing it with a collaborative spirit focused on a greater good. A collaborative environment allows a level playing field where good ideas can be challenged into great ideas. It also fosters the emotional safety needed for creative people to risk sharing their most divergent ideas without fear of judgment. The leader’s job is to set that standard and model it.

Provide structural guardrails without constraining freedom. Creativity is messy. It won’t follow strict protocols or processes. At the same time, it needs structure to thrive. How much structure and discipline is ideal? How much freedom will yield optimal results? A leader helps build collective capability by setting objectives and deadlines, providing creative spaces and designated times for diverging, and allowing teams to practice creativity. Put the tools and processes in place, and turn the team loose.

One of the greatest challenges for leaders is determining what role they should play in helping generate creative ideas and solutions. When leaders have more experience or talent than their team, deciding when to insert their own ideas instead of coaching others can be hard. Deadlines and slipping performance targets increase the leader’s risk of imposing their will, which just reinforces self-doubt on the team and perpetuates the cycle of the leader having to insert the “answer.” If you are going to participate in the ideation, take your leader hat off and, as convincingly as you can, inform your team not to treat your ideas any differently. Only do this if it strengthens the process and avoids muting their participation.

There is nothing more satisfying that watching your people fulfill the human need to create and having their creative contributions benefit the organization and the markets it serves. Doing this requires understanding the inherent tensions that come with leading creative endeavor. It takes intentional, thoughtful leadership to help your team unleash their most creative and powerful work.

Ron Carucci is co-founder and managing partner at Navalent, working with CEOs and executives pursuing transformational change for their organizations, leaders, and industries. He is the best-selling author of eight books, including the recent Amazon #1 Rising to Power. Connect with him on Twitter at @RonCarucci; download his free e-book on Leading Transformation.

If you are in an influential position, you have probably said words to the effect of “My door is always open.” You likely meant this declaration very genuinely. You might well feel that you are a pretty approachable sort of person and that others feel comfortable coming to you with their issues and their ideas.

This may be true.

But it probably isn’t.

Leaders often have an inflated idea of how easy it is for others to speak honestly to them. Our two-year research study, including interviews with over 60 senior executives, as well as workshops and case studies, illuminates a glaring blind spot: We simply don’t appreciate how risky it can feel for others to speak up.

This is because, if we are in a powerful position, we often take power for granted. As a member of a privileged in-group, we forget what it is like to be in the less privileged out-group.

Consider the phrase “My door is always open.” It contains a number of assumptions. First, people should meet you on your territory, rather than the other way around. Second, you have the luxury of a door. Third, you can choose when to close or open it.

These details are small but important. Organizational systems contain many subtle codes that encourage employees to conform. Perhaps the most obvious, one that breeds considerable cynicism, is when a powerful person tells people to challenge him…and then punishes those who do. Sam Goldwyn, the legendary American film producer, referred to this when he famously said: “I don’t want any yes-men around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their job.”

This seeming contradiction is alive and well in leaders today. When we interviewed the CEO of a global company, she enthusiastically agreed, saying, “I want people to be who they are.” Barely pausing for breath, she went on to explain, “But I do have a little list in my head of people who don’t fit.”

Most of us are pretty good at sensing danger. We know whether the person we are speaking to “has a little list,” and we sensibly stay silent. Such silence is a dangerous thing for any organization and any leader.

We know all the dangers of silence. If your employees are full of ideas about how you can do a better job for the customer, or get a better deal from a supplier, you need to know. If people cannot speak up to you, then you will be unaware of issues that could bring your team, your targets, and even your organization to its knees. An examination of the emissions scandal at VW, the retail account scandal at Wells Fargo, and numerous others is testament to how that can play out in the extreme.

For leaders, none of this is, or should be, news. Most leaders know they need to be more accessible, more conversational. And so executives agree to take part in the Friday-lunchtime-pizza-with-the-team sessions and say again and again that “My door is always open.” Then they wonder (occasionally with some relief) why people aren’t coming through it very often.

So how do you, as a leader, acknowledge power differences and genuinelyencourage others to speak up to you? Our research suggests that you need to ask questions in five areas:

First, are you honestly interested in other people’s opinions? And if you are, whose opinions are you most interested in hearing, and whose are you biased against? What data do you listen to most, and what are you largely deaf to (financial data, data about people, emotions)? Being genuinely curious about other perspectives requires a humility that can be in short supply as you head up the organizational hierarchy. As the CEO of one company admitted to us, “I expect that my ego sometimes prevents me hearing stuff I should be listening to.” Before you conclude that you are sure you don’t have a problem in this area, it is useful to check by asking yourself, “How do I know that I have a reputation for being open to changing my mind?”

Second, have you considered how risky it feels for others to speak up to you? You can investigate this more deeply by reflecting on how you tend to respond when challenged by people. It may well be that on the previous 10 occasions you received challenge with interest and admirable attentiveness, but on the eleventh you’d had a bad day and just couldn’t stop yourself from interrupting and grumpily disagreeing with the person. The eleventh occasion is the story everyone will tell around the office. And that story is the one that will live on for years. And it probably is the case that you judge people when they speak up (which is simply human), and it probably is the case that you also happen to be the one who determines the result of their performance appraisals. So it is you who will need to be extra vigilant of the signals you are sending out when someone has built up the courage to speak up. And you have to apologize publicly when you have a bad day (as everyone does) and cut somebody off at the knees.

Third, how aware are you of the political game being played? Politics is an inherent part of organizational life; personal agendas play out all the time in what we choose to say to one another. This is especially the case when you occupy an influential role. As one of our interviewees put it, “When they hear you’re the CEO…they say what they think you want to hear, which can be very frustrating.” Enabling others to speak up means understanding why this person might be saying what they are saying (or why they are staying silent) and making an informed choice about whether to surface that agenda, whether to gently lower the stakes so the person speaks up, or whether to widen the circle of individuals you listen to and include those less concerned with “playing the game.”

Fourth, what labels do people apply to you, and what labels do you apply to others that define the rules of what can be said? When we meet with others, we label them, consciously or unconsciously. For example, we badge others as “CEO,” “consultant,” “woman,” “young,” “new,” or “sales,” and these labels mean different things to different people in different contexts. But inevitably they are all markers of status, and status governs the unwritten rules around who can speak and who gets heard. Seeing unwritten advantage in action is not easy, particularly if you are fortunate enough to be in the in-group, but it does not mean we shouldn’t strive to become more aware and to mitigate any detrimental influence this labelling might have.

Finally, what specifically do you need to do and say to enable others to speak? This might include anything: reducing status difference by choosing to dress more casually, introducing a “red card” at executive committee meetings to ensure someone has the ability to challenge you, or carefully holding your tendency for extroversion in check so that others get a moment to speak up. These tactics can only be built on a solid foundation of self-awareness, informed by the responses to the four questions above.

If you are wondering why others aren’t speaking up more, first ask yourself how you are inadvertently silencing them.

Megan Reitz is Associate Professor of Leadership and Dialogue at Ashridge Executive Education at Hult International Business School. She is the author of Dialogue in Organizations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Previously, she was a consultant with Deloitte; surfed the dot-com boom with boo.com; and worked in strategy consulting for The Kalchas Group, now the strategic arm of Computer Science Corporation.

John Higgins is an independent researcher, coach, consultant and author. He has published widely with the Ashridge Executive Masters and Doctorate in Organizational Change, most recently with The Change Doctors: Re-Imagining Organizational Practice (Libri, 2014).

]]>info@coachmatching.com (Megan Reitz & John Higgins)LeadershipThu, 12 Oct 2017 15:40:26 +0200How to Tell Leaders They’re Not as Great as They Think They Arehttps://coachmatching.co.za/library/leadership/item/470-how-to-tell-leaders-they-re-not-as-great-as-they-think-they-are
https://coachmatching.co.za/library/leadership/item/470-how-to-tell-leaders-they-re-not-as-great-as-they-think-they-are

Although we live in a world that glorifies self-belief and stigmatizes self-doubt, there are really only two advantages to thinking that you’re better than you actually are. The first is when you’re attempting to do a difficult task. Believing that you can do something difficult is half the battle, but if you truly overrate your abilities, then by definition you will fail. The second is fooling others into thinking that you are competent. Most people will be found out eventually, and the personal benefits of faking competence will be offset by the negative consequences for others. For example, deluded leaders may come across as charismatic and talented, but their overconfidence puts their followers at risk in the long run. In contrast, when leaders are aware of their limitations, they are less likely to make mistakes that put their teams, organizations, and countries in danger.

And yet — as I demonstrate in my latest book — leaders are not generally known for their self-awareness. Although leadership talent is normally distributed, 80% of people think they are better-than-average leaders. Moreover, with narcissism rates rising steadily for decades, there is no reason to expect future leaders to be more accurate in their self-evaluations, let alone to be humble. Strengths-based coaching, and removing negative feedback from performance appraisals are aggravating the problem, validating leaders’ fantasized talents much like when parents tell their children that they are the brightest and cutest in the world. This is especially likely when leaders are intimidating, or when they surround themselves with sycophantic employees. As a result, leaders are deprived of the very feedback they need to get better.

Whether you manage or coach leaders, or are just trying to provide some feedback to your own boss, here are three simple points you may wish to consider in order to have this difficult (but necessary) conversation with them:

Tap into their personal motives: Nobody likes to be criticized — especially high-status individuals. However, if you can help leaders understand how they can achieve their personal goals, they will pay attention. The most effective way of doing this is by tapping into the leader’s motives and values. For instance, leaders who are driven by recognition care a great deal about their reputation. Telling them that they are seen as less capable than they think they are will probably mobilize them, even if you allow for the possibility that their reputation is unwarranted. On the other hand, when leaders are driven by power, you will be able to appeal to them by linking the feedback to their performance and career progression: “If you change X and Y, you will be able to outperform your competitors and make it to the top”. In contrast, when dealing with altruistic leaders, your best strategy for delivering negative feedback is to convey that “by changing X and Y, you will be able to harness your team’s potential and improve their engagement and wellbeing”.

Let the data do the talking: Leaders are not always interested in people, and they often regard psychological matters as fluffy. On the upside, they tend to care about results. A good way to help leaders understand that their self-views and behaviors matter is via 360-degree feedback (360s) and employee engagement In particular, there is ample evidence for the connection between 360s and leadership performance, as well as a leader’s integrity. The use of 360s also enhances coaching and development interventions by closing the “blind-spots” between leaders’ self-views and other people’s views on them. As for engagement, it is arguably the best source of data to evaluate leaders’ effectiveness — other than actual team performance data. For example, a meta-analysis of almost 8,000 business units and 36 organizations shows that increases in employee engagement are associated with better business-unit outcomes, including revenues and profits. Another data-driven approach to making leaders aware of their potential deficits is through scientifically valid personality assessments. When reports focus not just on the bright side, but also the dark side of personality, leaders will be able to understand what their “toxic assets” are. Indeed, dark side personality traits predict leader derailment even in the presence of outstanding technical skills and expertise. From Dominic Strauss-Kahn to Bernie Madoff, there is no shortage of famous case studies demonstrating that brilliant leaders can damage their own and others’ careers when they overuse certain strengths and are unable to tame their undesirable qualities.

Highlight the downside of self-confidence: A final point to consider is that leaders who are interested in science may be easily persuaded of the virtues of modesty, as well as the adverse consequences of hubris. In other words, there is vast empirical evidence to convince leaders that excessive self-confidence is more problematic than they think. For example, economic studies suggest that overconfidence leads to poor financial decisions and an inability to attend to social cues that highlight one’s mistakes. Financial studies show that overconfidence drives Forbes 500 CEOs to “persistently fail to reduce their personal exposure to company-specific risk”. Business studies show that overconfident entrepreneurs are not just more likely to fail, but also die younger than their more insecure counterparts. By the same token, there is also compelling evidence for the benefits of (moderate) self-doubt. For instance, academic studies suggest that leaders who underrate their abilities tend to be more effective, and broad theories of motivationsuggests that self-perceived deficits in competence are pivotal for improving one’s performance. Perhaps most famously, Jim Collins’ seminal analyses of effective executives suggested that the most outstanding leaders are not just relentless and driven, but also humble.

Sadly, these suggestions are not always easily applied. For example, leaders with poor 360s tend to dismiss the value of feedback, which makes them virtually uncoachable. This is one of the fundamental limitations of coaching: it often works with those who need it the least; but it works a lot less with those who need it the most. There are also too many sources of (fake) positive feedback at the disposal of leaders, no matter how talented they are. In that sense, the world of work is not so different from Facebook, though even Facebook has decided to allow users to leave negative feedback on other people’s posts. Ultimately, we need to get better at selecting leaders who are comfortable with their own insecurities and self-doubt. As the great Voltaire noted: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”

There aren’t many leaders who would disagree with the idea that a healthy, productive culture is a defining element of business success. Yet I’ve seen so many companies with lofty-sounding “mission statements” and “core values” that have the most toxic workplaces imaginable. I’ve met so many leaders who are brilliant when it comes to product design and capital structure but who treat the people in business as an afterthought, a matter of sound administration as opposed to daring innovation.

In other words, so much of our thinking about organizational culture has become so bland, so unobjectionable, that it is on the verge of becoming meaningless. What follows, then, is an attempt at culture shock — five hard questions about the “soft” side of business that leaders must be able to answer if they hope to build a workplace that works.

Is your talent strategy rooted in your business strategy? Culture can’t just be an assortment of well-meaning HR practices; it has to grow out of distinctive business practices. As I reflect on the great companies I’ve gotten to know — companies that are winning big in tough, competitive fields — they all exude what brand strategist Adam Morgan calls a “lighthouse identity.” Every time you encounter them, however you encounter them, you understand what makes them different, what they’re prepared to do that other companies aren’t, and why what they’re doing is relevant today. That’s why building a great culture starts with intellectual clarity about what your organization stands for and why you expect to win. There can be no talent strategy without a compelling business strategy.

Does your company work as distinctively as it competes? Yes, the most successful companies think differently from everyone else — that’s what separates them from the competition in the marketplace. But they also care more than everyone else — that’s what holds people together as colleagues in the workplace. So much of what we focus on as leaders is how to be more clever: big data, slick apps, social media. A great culture allows clever organizations to be more human, to make everything they do more authentic, real, memorable. The true promise of a culture, argues influential venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, is to “be provocative enough to change what people do every day.” That’s the real connection between culture and strategy: If you want to energize and elevate how your organization competes, you have to energize and elevate how your people behave.

Can you capture what it means to be a member of your organization? At its core, the role of culture is to reinforce a sense of belonging, a shared commitment among colleagues about how they solve problems, share information, serve customers, and deliver experiences. Which is why the most enduring cultures are built on language and rituals that are designed to create a palpable sense of community — which, in many cases, only makes sense to people who are part of that community. A favorite slogan among students and faculty at Texas A&M University, a long-established school with a one-of-a-kind culture, sums it up: “From the outside looking in, you can’t understand it. From the inside looking out, you can’t explain it.” That’s the spirit I’ve seen at companies with the most powerful cultures. Their leaders devote enormous time and imagination to devising small gestures and little symbols that send big messages about what it takes for everyone to be at their best every day.

Is your culture built for learning as well as performance? High-output cultures are all about fierce competition, crisp execution, and a relentless commitment to service. But truly enduring cultures are also about change and renewal. It’s one of the hazards that comes with success: The better an organization performs, the more ingrained its culture becomes, and the harder it can be for executives and employees to stay alert to big shifts in markets, technology, and culture. That’s why the best cultures and the most effective leaders keep learning as fast as the world is changing. They’re constantly scanning for new practices from other companies, new ideas for unrelated industries, a new sense of what’s possible in their own fields. At WD-40, a company with one of the richest learning cultures I’ve seen, CEO Garry Ridge likes to challenge his colleagues with a simple question: When’s the last time you did something for the first time?

Can your culture maintain its zest for change and renewal, even when the company stumbles? It’s a lot easier to maintain high levels of energy and morale at a company when sales are booming and the stock price is soaring. But the reality of competition today is that long-term success is virtually impossible without short-term stumbles. For any organization, part of staying relevant is experimenting with dramatically new technologies, sketching alternative business models, and rethinking how it engages with customers — all of which are bound to involve setbacks and disappointments. That’s why the most enduring cultures are the most resilient cultures. Colleagues at every level embrace the power of creative ideas, deep convictions, and confidence in the face of missteps. Leadership scholar John Gardner calls this outlook “tough-minded optimism,” and it’s a hallmark of cultures that can move and morph with the times.

For all of the noble talk about talent and values, I can honestly say that I haven’t met many leaders who think as creatively or as rigorously about their company’s culture as they do about R&D and finance. But for the truly great leaders I’ve studied, the people factor is just as vital as the technology or money one. Here’s hoping that you, like those great leaders, can address these five hard questions about the soft side of business.

We’ve all experienced the disappointment of an important decision not going our way. The feeling is far worse when you feel that the decision was somehow “rigged” against you — that you never had a chance, that your input wasn’t given its fair due, or that only some of the data was considered. You can accept a fair decision that goes the other way, but a rigged decision feels much worse. And the ill will festers.

Poor decision making happens in our business, civic, and personal lives. But often we are perpetrators, participating in or making rigged decisions, even if we may not realize it.

Rigged decisions are all too frequent, and while they come in many forms, the most virulent feature the following steps:

Make the decision based on some or all of the following: ego, ideology, experience, fear, or consultation with like-minded advisers.

Find data that justifies your decision.

Announce and execute the decision, and defend it to the minimum degree necessary.

Take credit if the decision proves beneficial, and assign blame if not.

Let’s start with the first step: Make the decision. Anyone who is familiar with the scientific method (or has served on a jury) knows that it is wrong to “make the decision” ahead of assembling the relevant facts. You must have a full view of the situation before making a choice. So why do so many people work the other way around?

Making good decisions involves hard work. Important decisions are made in the face of great uncertainty, and often under time pressure. The world is a complex place: People and organizations respond to any decision, working together or against one another, in ways that defy comprehension. There are too many factors to consider. There is rarely an abundance of relevant, trusted data that bears directly on the matter at hand. Quite the contrary — there are plenty of partially relevant facts from disparate sources — some of which can be trusted, some not — pointing in different directions.

With this backdrop, it is easy to see how one can fall into the trap of making the decision first and then finding the data to back it up later. It is so much faster. But faster is not the same as well-thought-out. Before you jump to a decision, you should ask yourself, “Should someone else who has time to assemble a complete picture make this decision?” If so, you should assign the decision to that person or team.

This can be challenging for executives who’ve created environments in which decisions are required to go through the highest level. I once worked with an organization of about 1,500 people in which a senior VP had to approve orders for copier paper! If this is how your organization works, consider whether there are ways to create an environment in which proper decision making can happen at lower levels. Doing so will free up your time for more-important decisions and improve the overall capability of your entire organization.

Next, ask yourself, “Do I really have a broad enough perspective to make and defend this decision?” It appears to me that the reason so many decision makers take step 2 (seeking data to justify an already-made decision) is they sense that the answer is “no,” even if they can’t articulate why.

This route is common both in business and in the world at large — so much so that TV personality Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” to mean, roughly, one’s preference for concepts or facts one wishes to be true. There has always been plenty of data to support whatever decision one wants to make. And doing so has grown progressively easier with the rise of the internet and social media. It is all too easy to fall victim to confirmation bias, where one pays attention to data that supports a decision and dismisses data that does not.

How can you avoid this trap? The first part of the answer lies in simply admitting your lack of confidence in instincts alone. None of us likes to admit we’re biased — after all, the word carries negative connotations. But the best decision makers I know freely admit their preconceptions. What values or beliefs may be coloring your thinking? Taking a hard look in the mirror forces you to acknowledge other perspectives, softens your decision, and helps you seek a broader view.

The second part asks you go against your inclinations: What would happen if you decided to move forward in the opposite direction of what you originally chose? Gather the data you would need to defend this opposite view, and compare it to the data used to support your original decision. Reevaluate your decision in light of the bigger data set. Your perspective still may not be complete, but it will be much more balanced.

Finally, before you commit to announcing, executing, and defending your choice, try out your decision on a “friendly” or two. A friendly is someone who is on your side and wants you to succeed. Here, I’m referring to someone who wants to protect you and has the courage to honestly tell you when your thinking is incomplete, when you’ve missed something important, and when you’re just plain wrong. If a friendly advises any of these things, start anew, rethinking your decision and the data you need to make it.

Few people set out to make a rigged decision, but when you’re pressured to make a choice fast, you may fall victim to a flawed process. By asking yourself tough questions, getting the right people involved, admitting your own preconceptions, and subjecting your thinking to someone who will really challenge it, you can expose a poor decision-making process and help correct it.

Executives and managers invest a lot of effort and time building trust in their teams: both establishing trust in their employees and ensuring that their employees trust them in return. But many employees say they do not feel trusted by their managers. And when employees don’t feel trusted, workplace productivity and engagement often suffer. It’s up to managers to signal trust in their employees in consistent and thoughtful ways.

We have explored the dynamics of the trusting relationship between managers and their employees for over 10 years in multiple organizations and hundreds of manager-employee pairs. Research that we and others have conducted offers evidence of the ripple effects of a manager-employee trust gap. Employees who are less trusted by their manager exert less effort, are less productive, and are more likely to leave the organization. Employees who do feel trusted are higher performers and exert extra effort, going above and beyond role expectations. Plus, when employees feel their supervisors trust them to get key tasks done, they have greater confidence in the workplace and perform at a higher level.

In short, trust begets trust. When people are trusted, they tend to trust in return. But people must feel trusted to reciprocate trust. Managers have to do more than trust employees; they need to show it. Based on our research work and time spent in companies studying trust, we’ve identified some of the most important ways managers erode trust and how they can signal it more clearly to their teams.

How Managers Chip Away at Trust

Mutual trust requires some degree of risk-taking and reflection. There are at least three reasons why leaders and organizations don’t demonstrate their trust in employees:

Lack of self-awareness. Managers often lack the self-awareness required to realize that their own actions may communicate a lack of trust. They are likely to think that because they trust an employee, the employee will know it. But even well-intentioned actions, such as providing support or periodic check-ins on a project, may convey to employees that they are not trusted enough to complete the work independently.

Risk-averse by design. Organizations often design their structure, policies, and culture in order to minimize risk and optimize efficiency. But organizations that are risk averse may also signal that employees cannot be trusted with resources and information. Centralization of authority, restricted resources and information, and bureaucratic cultures heavy with regulation limit employee initiative. Managers may support their employees taking that initiative — but in a risk-averse organization, such ideas won’t likely see the light of day. One company we worked with was seeking to cultivate innovation and creativity, but the approval for new projects involved a 12 -month process requiring endorsement from a C-suite committee. This process was effectively inaccessible to many employees, stifling innovation and leaving employees’ feeling untrusted. And even if the fault lies with the organization’s policy, employees may still blame their own supervisor, thereby eroding trust.

“Bottom line” mentality. Pressure to reach performance targets and control costs sometimes leads managers to do things that unintentionally signal a lack of trust. When these pressures are great, many managers become focused on their own job security and respond by constricting control. This can lead to the type of thinking that focuses on only securing bottom-line outcomes, which often come at the expense of other priorities, like developing relationships and empowering employees to make independent decisions.

What Managers Can Do to Signal Trust

Despite these common obstacles, there are several ways managers can signal trust in an employee:

Taking stock. First, don’t assume that your employees have high trust in you. Learn to read their trust levels by understanding the risks and vulnerabilities they face. Take an inventory of the practices, policies, and controls found in your organization: Are they risk-tolerant? When you look at policies from the perspective of the employee, are they designed to engage employees or to protect the organization from them?

Take an assessment of your own conduct, too — the list of questions below is a good start. If you’ve answered “no” to any of these questions, your employees likely do not trust you as much as you would hope.

(Carefully) giving up control. The onus to grow mutual trust is on the manager. That means not only cultivating employees’ trust, but conveying prudent, incremental trust in them. Managers need to adequately scope assignments, grant resource authority, and not undermine it later. Ceding control also requires a certain tolerance for mistakes. Rather than taking harsh corrective action, treat employee mistakes as opportunities to facilitate learning.

Sharing information. Another important way leaders take risks is communicating openly and honestly with employees. Managers are often reluctant to share information and explain their decisions for fear of premature leaks, second-guessing, or dissension. Being transparent signals that you trust your employees with the truth, even in difficult circumstances. One manager of public sector employees faced this challenge for several years when making merit pay decisions with an ever-shrinking budget. His solution was to provide a detailed description of the budgetary constraints and how criteria for merit raises would be applied. He provided this explanation before communicating merit decisions. Such openness not only preempted suspicions of bias, it conveyed that the manager trusted employees with sensitive information.

Pushing for needed change. Earlier, we mentioned a company whose innovation was constrained by a risk averse culture; one they knew they needed to change. They created a new review committee composed of middle-level managers who allocated smaller sums of capital to projects within 1-2 days. By expanding this authority, the company conveyed trust in employees across ranks. And, in rapidly allocating smaller amounts of capital, management showed a willingness to experiment and learn from potential missteps. In short, the company is more willing to take risks with employees.

Investing in employee development. Finally, letting employees know you are willing to invest in their potential and advocate for them conveys confidence and trust. Get to know their career aspirations, then help them reach their goals. After all, as a manager, your own success is dependent on the success of those you develop.

Managers may be unaware of the unintended signals they send regarding how much they trust their employees. To build an environment of sustained mutual trust, learn to read the trust landscape and take care to clearly signal trust and confidence in employees.

Holly Henderson Brower is an Associate Professor at the School of Business at Wake Forest University where she also is the faculty director of the internship program. She consults and publishes on issues related to trust, leadership and effective decision making in both nonprofit and for-profit organizations.

Scott Wayne Lester is a Professor of Management at the College of Business at University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire. He publishes and consults on issues related to leadership development, trust, communication, and the multi-generational workforce.

M. Audrey Korsgaard is a Professor of Management at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. Her research and consultancy address trust and leadership development.

Recently I was talking with a new manager about the team she had inherited. While she thought that most of the team members were doing a good job, she was concerned that one or two people were not pulling their weight. She wasn’t sure what to do about them. She was worried that if she fired these people, or even put them on notice, it would sink morale and others would worry about losing their jobs, too. She also didn’t want to come across as mean and insensitive so early on, because she wanted her team to like her. But she knew that if she didn’t do something, the team might not hit its goals.

These concerns probably sound familiar to any new manager. Suddenly, instead of focusing only on your own performance, you have to make sure that other people are performing. Instead of building relationships with one or two coworkers, now you have to think about how you relate to the whole team. It’s not an easy transition. In order to manage it successfully, there are two principles you should keep in mind.

Principle number one is to remember that as a manager, your primary responsibility is to the organization and the achievement of its performance targets. Your job is not to compete for the “most popular manager” award or to make things easy for your team. Principle number two is that your success depends on the success of your team members. You need to help them achieve their individual and collective targets and feel good about the company — but you can’t do their jobs for them. If someone can’t perform, you have to find someone else who can, or you’ll be putting your own success at risk.

Applying these principles means that you have to be, in the words of Jack Welch, hardheaded and softhearted. You have to prioritize the team achieving its goals and everyone performing at the required level. But in order to do this, you have to set your team members up for success. This means understanding each person’s individual style, personality, and capabilities — and what they need to be successful.

Let’s go back to this new manager’s dilemma. She should not let the weaker performers on her team off the hook. This would not only put her and the team at risk of missing their goals but also send a message to other members that she is not serious about achieving the targets. Some employees may resent the fact that they have to work hard while others can slack off. Eventually they too might feel they can get away with underperforming. So not dealing with poor performers can be worse for morale and overall team performance than confronting the issue directly.

At the same time, the new manager shouldn’t judge the underperformers too quickly by assuming they are not capable or motivated. She shouldn’t assume that they can’t do better or aren’t the right people for the job. Instead, she should consider the potential reasons for their performance. Maybe the previous manager hadn’t insisted on high performance, or hadn’t trained them properly, or hadn’t given them the tools they needed.

So what should the new manager do? First, she needs to make her expectations about high performance clear to everyone on the team. She should create a performance “contract” with the team that lays out the overall goals and what each person needs to contribute to reach them. This contract might also include the behaviors that are expected.

Based on these requirements, she then needs to meet with the “problem” performers one-on-one to find out what’s going on. What do they need in order to get to a higher level? How can she help? Are they willing to do what’s needed to step up? For example, some people, when confronted honestly and constructively with high performance requirements, will start talking about whether there might be other jobs that better fit their skills. Others might raise the question of whether they have the capacity to work at that level. And still others, in the best scenario, will be excited about the challenge and will want to talk about what they have to do in order to improve.

For those team members who are ready to move forward, the manager has to establish an action plan and timeline for getting them to acceptable performance. This might include formal training, peer coaching, observation, future feedback sessions, or any number of other supportive steps. And for those who are not willing to put in the work, the manager has to move forward with replacing them or redistributing their work to others.

What’s important is that a manager do this transparently and quickly — in a matter of days, or weeks at the most. Creating the expectation for high performance and doing what’s necessary to help your team be successful is a critical skill for anyone managing others. So learning how to do it at the beginning of your managerial career will serve you well not only in this first job but also in many to come.

Culture is like the wind. It is invisible, yet its effect can be seen and felt. When it is blowing in your direction, it makes for smooth sailing. When it is blowing against you, everything is more difficult.

For organizations seeking to become more adaptive and innovative, culture change is often the most challenging part of the transformation. Innovation demands new behaviors from leaders and employees that are often antithetical to corporate cultures, which are historically focused on operational excellence and efficiency.

But culture change can’t be achieved through top-down mandate. It lives in the collective hearts and habits of people and their shared perception of “how things are done around here.” Someone with authority can demand compliance, but they can’t dictate optimism, trust, conviction, or creativity.

At IDEO, we believe that the most significant change often comes through social movements, and that despite the differences between private enterprises and society, leaders can learn from how these initiators engage and mobilize the masses to institutionalize new societal norms.

Dr. Reddy’s: A Movement-Minded Case Study

One leader who understands this well is G.V. Prasad, CEO of Dr. Reddy’s, a 33-year-old global pharmaceutical company headquartered in India that produces affordable generic medication. With the company’s more than seven distinct business units operating in 27 countries and more than 20,000 employees, decision making had grown more convoluted and branches of the organization had become misaligned. Over the years, Dr. Reddy’s had built in lots of procedures, and for many good reasons. But those procedures had also slowed the company down.

Prasad sought to evolve Dr. Reddy’s culture to be nimble, innovative, and patient-centered. He knew it required a journey to align and galvanize all employees. His leadership team began with a search for purpose. Over the course of several months, the Dr. Reddy’s team worked with IDEO to learn about the needs of everyone, from shop floor workers to scientists, external partners, and investors. Together they defined and distilled the purpose of the company, paring it down to four simple words that center on the patient: “Good health can’t wait.”

But instead of plastering this new slogan on motivational posters and repeating it in all-hands meetings, the leadership team began by quietly using it to start guiding their own decisions. The goal was to demonstratethis idea in action, not talk about it. Projects were selected across channels to highlight agility, innovation, and customer centricity. Product packaging was redesigned to be more user-friendly and increase adherence. The role of sales representatives in Russia was recast to act as knowledge hubs for physicians, since better physicians lead to healthier patients. A comprehensive internal data platform was developed to help Dr. Reddy’s employees be proactive with their customer requests and solve any problems in an agile way.

At this point it was time to more broadly share the stated purpose — first internally with all employees, and then externally with the world. At the internal launch event, Dr. Reddy’s employees learned about their purpose and were invited to be part of realizing it. Everyone was asked to make a personal promise about how they, in their current role, would contribute to “good health can’t wait.” The following day Dr. Reddy’s unveiled a new brand identity and website that publicly stated its purpose. Soon after, the company established two new “innovation studios” in Hyderabad and Mumbai to offer additional structural support to creativity within the company.

Prasad saw a change in the company culture right away: After we introduced the idea of “good health can’t wait,” one of the scientists told me he developed a product in 15 days and broke every rule there was in the company. He was proudly stating that! Normally, just getting the raw materials would take him months, not to mention the rest of the process for making the medication. But he was acting on that urgency. And now he’s taking this lesson of being lean and applying it to all our procedures.

What Does a Movement Look Like?

To draw parallels between the journey of Dr. Reddy’s and a movement, we need to better understand movements.

We often think of movements as starting with a call to action. But movement research suggests that they actually start with emotion — a diffuse dissatisfaction with the status quo and a broad sense that the current institutions and power structures of the society will not address the problem. This brewing discontent turns into a movement when a voice arises that provides a positive vision and a path forward that’s within the power of the crowd.

What’s more, social movements typically start small. They begin with a group of passionate enthusiasts who deliver a few modest wins. While these wins are small, they’re powerful in demonstrating efficacy to nonparticipants, and they help the movement gain steam. The movement really gathers force and scale once this group successfully co-opts existing networks and influencers. Eventually, in successful movements, leaders leverage their momentum and influence to institutionalize the change in the formal power structures and rules of society.

Practices for Leading a Cultural Movement

Leaders should not be too quick or simplistic in their translation of social movement dynamics into change management plans. That said, leaders can learn a lot from the practices of skillful movement makers.

Frame the issue. Successful leaders of movements are often masters of framing situations in terms that stir emotion and incite action. Framing can also apply social pressure to conform. For example, “Secondhand smoking kills. So shame on you for smoking around others.”

In terms of organizational culture change, simply explaining the need for change won’t cut it. Creating a sense of urgency is helpful, but can be short-lived. To harness people’s full, lasting commitment, they must feel a deep desire, and even responsibility, to change. A leader can do this by framing change within the organization’s purpose — the “why we exist” question. A good organizational purpose calls for the pursuit of greatness in service of others. It asks employees to be driven by more than personal gain. It gives meaning to work, conjures individual emotion, and incites collective action. Prasad framed Dr. Reddy’s transformation as the pursuit of “good health can’t wait.”

Demonstrate quick wins. Movement makers are very good at recognizing the power of celebrating small wins. Research has shown that demonstrating efficacy is one way that movements bring in people who are sympathetic but not yet mobilized to join.

When it comes to organizational culture change, leaders too often fall into the trap of declaring the culture shifts they hope to see. Instead, they need to spotlight examplesof actions they hope to see more of within the culture. Sometimes, these examples already exist within the culture, but at a limited scale. Other times, they need to be created. When Prasad and his leadership team launched projects across key divisions, those projects served to demonstrate the efficacy of a nimble, innovative, and customer-centered way of working and of how pursuit of purpose could deliver outcomes the business cared about. Once these projects were far enough along, the Dr. Reddy’s leadership used them to help communicate their purpose and culture change ambitions.

Harness networks. Effective movement makers are extremely good at building coalitions, bridging disparate groups to form a larger and more diverse network that shares a common purpose. And effective movement makers know how to activate existing networks for their purposes. This was the case with the leaders of the 1960s civil rights movement, who recruited members through the strong community ties formed in churches. But recruiting new members to a cause is not the only way that movement makers leverage social networks. They also use social networks to spread ideas and broadcast their wins.

Leadership at Dr. Reddy’s did not hide in a back room and come up with their purpose. Over the course of several months, people from across the organization were engaged in the process. The approach was built on the belief that people are more apt to support what they have a stake in creating. And during the organization-wide launch event, Prasad invited all employees to make the purpose their own by defining how they personally would help deliver “good health can’t wait.”

Create safe havens. Movement makers are experts at creating or identifying spaces within which movement members can craft strategy and discuss tactics. Such spaces have included beauty shops in the Southern U.S. during the civil rights movement, Quaker work camps in the 1960s and 1970s, the Seneca Women’s Encampment of the 1980s and early 1990s. These are spaces where the rules of engagement and behaviors of activists are different from those of the dominant culture. They’re microcosms of what the movement hopes will become the future.

The dominant culture and structure of today’s organizations are perfectly designed to produce their current behaviors and outcomes, regardless of whether those outcomes are the ones you want. If your hope is for individuals to act differently, it helps to change their surrounding conditions to be more supportive of the new behaviors, particularly when they are antithetical to the dominant culture. Outposts and labs are often built as new environments that serve as a microcosm for change. Dr. Reddy’s established two innovation labs to explore the future of medicine and create a space where it’s easier for people to embrace new beliefs and perform new behaviors.

Embrace symbols. Movement makers are experts at constructing and deploying symbols and costumes that simultaneously create a feeling of solidarity and demarcate who they are and what they stand for to the outside world. Symbols and costumes of solidarity help define the boundary between “us” and “them” for movements. These symbols can be as simple as a T-shirt, bumper sticker, or button supporting a general cause, or as elaborate as the giant puppets we often see used in protest events.

Dr. Reddy’s linked its change in culture and purpose with a new corporate brand identity. Internally and externally, the act reinforced a message of unity and commitment. The entire company stands together in pursuit of this purpose.

The Challenge to Leadership

Unlike a movement maker, an enterprise leader is often in a position of authority. They can mandate changes to the organization — and at times they should. However, when it comes to culture change, they should do so sparingly. It’s easy to overuse one’s authority in the hopes of accelerating transformation.

It’s also easy for an enterprise leader to shy away from organizational friction. Harmony is generally a preferred state, after all. And the success of an organizational transition is often judged by its seamlessness.

In a movements-based approach to change, a moderate amount of friction is positive. A complete absence of friction probably means that little is actually changing. Look for the places where the movement faces resistance and experiences friction. They often indicate where the dominant organizational design and culture may need to evolve.

And remember that culture change only happens when people take action. So start there. While articulating a mission and changing company structures are important, it’s often a more successful approach to tackle those sorts of issues after you’ve been able to show people the change you want to see.

Bryan Walker is a Partner and Managing Director at IDEO San Francisco.

Sarah A. Soule is the Morgridge Professor of Organizational Behavior an Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Esther is a well-liked manager of a small team. Kind and respectful, she is sensitive to the needs of others. She is a problem solver; she tends to see setbacks as opportunities. She’s always engaged and is a source of calm to her colleagues. Her manager feels lucky to have such an easy direct report to work with and often compliments Esther on her high levels of emotional intelligence, or EI. And Esther indeed counts EI as one of her strengths; she’s grateful for at least one thing she doesn’t have to work on as part of her leadership development. It’s strange, though — even with her positive outlook, Esther is starting to feel stuck in her career. She just hasn’t been able to demonstrate the kind of performance her company is looking for. So much for emotional intelligence, she’s starting to think.

The trap that has ensnared Esther and her manager is a common one: They are defining emotional intelligence much too narrowly. Because they’re focusing only on Esther’s sociability, sensitivity, and likability, they’re missing critical elements of emotional intelligence that could make her a stronger, more effective leader. A recent HBR article highlights the skills that a kind, positive manager like Esther might lack: the ability to deliver difficult feedback to employees, the courage to ruffle feathers and drive change, the creativity to think outside the box. But these gaps aren’t a result of Esther’s emotional intelligence; they’re simply evidence that her EI skills are uneven. In the model of EI and leadership excellence that we have developed over 30 years of studying the strengths of outstanding leaders, we’ve found that having a well-balanced array of specific EI capabilities actually prepares a leader for exactly these kinds of tough challenges.

There are many models of emotional intelligence, each with its own set of abilities; they are often lumped together as “EQ” in the popular vernacular. We prefer “EI,” which we define as comprising four domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Nested within each domain are twelve EI competencies, learned and learnable capabilities that allow outstanding performance at work or as a leader (see the image below). These include areas in which Esther is clearly strong: empathy, positive outlook, and self-control. But they also include crucial abilities such as achievement, influence, conflict management, teamwork and inspirational leadership. These skills require just as much engagement with emotions as the first set, and should be just as much a part of any aspiring leader’s development priorities.

For example, if Esther had strength in conflict management, she would be skilled in giving people unpleasant feedback. And if she were more inclined to influence, she would want to provide that difficult feedback as a way to lead her direct reports and help them grow. Say, for example, that Esther has a peer who is overbearing and abrasive. Rather than smoothing over every interaction, with a broader balance of EI skills she could bring up the issue to her colleague directly, drawing on emotional self-control to keep her own reactivity at bay while telling him what, specifically, does not work in his style. Bringing simmering issues to the surface goes to the core of conflict management. Esther could also draw on influence strategy to explain to her colleague that she wants to see him succeed, and that if he monitored how his style impacted those around him he would understand how a change would help everyone.

Similarly, if Esther had developed her inspirational leadership competence, she would be more successful at driving change. A leader with this strength can articulate a vision or mission that resonates emotionally with both themselves and those they lead, which is a key ingredient in marshaling the motivation essential for going in a new direction. Indeed, several studies have found a strong association between EI, driving change, and visionary leadership.

In order to excel, leaders need to develop a balance of strengths across the suite of EI competencies. When they do that, excellent business results follow.

How can you tell where your EI needs improvement — especially if you feel that it’s strong in some areas?

Simply reviewing the 12 competencies in your mind can give you a sense of where you might need some development. There are a number of formal models of EI, and many of them come with their own assessment tools. When choosing a tool to use, consider how well it predicts leadership outcomes. Some assess how you see yourself; these correlate highly with personality tests, which also tap into a person’s “self-schema.” Others, like that of Yale University president Peter Salovey and his colleagues, define EI as an ability; their test, the MSCEIT(a commercially available product), correlates more highly with IQ than any other EI test.

We recommend comprehensive 360-degree assessments, which collect both self-ratings and the views of others who know you well. This external feedback is particularly helpful for evaluating all areas of EI, including self-awareness (how would you know that you are not self-aware?). You can get a rough gauge of where your strengths and weaknesses lie by asking those who work with you to give you feedback. The more people you ask, the better a picture you get.

Formal 360-degree assessments, which incorporate systematic, anonymous observations of your behavior by people who work with you, have been found to not correlate well with IQ or personality, but they are the best predictors of a leader’s effectiveness, actual business performance, engagement, and job (and life) satisfaction. Into this category fall our own model and the Emotional and Social Competency Inventory, or ESCI 360, a commercially available assessment we developed with Korn Ferry Hay Group to gauge the 12 EI competencies, which rely on how others rate observable behaviors in evaluating a leader. The larger the gap between a leader’s self-ratings and how others see them, research finds, the fewer EI strengths the leader actually shows, and the poorer the business results.

These assessments are critical to a full evaluation of your EI, but even understanding that these 12 competencies are all a part of your emotional intelligence is an important first step in addressing areas where your EI is at its weakest. Coaching is the most effective method for improving in areas of EI deficit. Having expert support during your ups and downs as you practice operating in a new way is invaluable.

Even people with many apparent leadership strengths can stand to better understand those areas of EI where we have room to grow. Don’t shortchange your development as a leader by assuming that EI is all about being sweet and chipper, or that your EI is perfect if you are — or, even worse, assume that EI can’t help you excel in your career.

Richard E. Boyatzis is a Professor in the Departments of Organizational Behavior, Psychology, and Cognitive Science at the Weatherhead School of Management and Distinguished University Professor at Case Western Reserve University.

]]>info@coachmatching.com (Daniel Goleman and Richard E. Boyatzis)LeadershipTue, 06 Jun 2017 09:26:16 +0200How to Get People to Collaborate When You Don’t Control Their Salaryhttps://coachmatching.co.za/library/leadership/item/445-how-to-get-people-to-collaborate-when-you-don-t-control-their-salary
https://coachmatching.co.za/library/leadership/item/445-how-to-get-people-to-collaborate-when-you-don-t-control-their-salary

Most of us assume that if we want to change people’s behavior, we need to change their incentives.

For example, after I published research and advice on collaboration in professional service firms, I heard from a surprising number of people who wrote to ask questions like, “Maybe it’ll work in a partnership, like a law or consulting firm, but what about in my company, where employees aren’t owners and can’t change the rules?” People in industries as different as commercial real estate, pharma, biotech startups, hedge funds, and public school districts worried about how to transform a competitive, star-driven culture into a collaborative one when they had no power to juggle financial rewards and no influence over promotion decisions.

To pursue this issue, I picked a new research setting where the reward system is highly constrained — and so is the career ladder. By investigating how a leader can boost cross-silo collaboration without changing either the compensation or the promotion system, maybe we could find lessons that translate to companies where people also face limits on their ability to change organizational structures.

Tackling Collaboration in a Constrained Setting

The Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is one of the world’s leading institutions for adult and pediatric patients. Collaboration is as necessary as it is tricky in this setting. Just as with business knowledge, scientific knowledge is changing so rapidly that Dana-Farber’s doctor-researchers must evolve quickly from generalists to specialists who focus on a highly specialized niche within cancer detection and treatment. Yet tackling cancer requires a multidisciplinary effort, ranging from disease biology to population monitoring. Research efforts can’t focus on applying the findings of deep, narrow studies; they must add up to a much broader, more integrated program.

The difficult angle for the Dana-Farber — the challenge shared by many companies — is that collaboration doesn’t come naturally to many of the highest performers and the system seems almost geared against teamwork. The organizational stars have tremendous autonomy over key work decisions. And just like software engineers who hold code in their head or a law firm partner who controls critical client relationships, the Dana-Farber scientists hold a credible threat of walking out the door with their IP and grant-winning prowess. The parallels with business are clear: Stars are a crucial but perhaps fragile source of innovation and competitive advantage.

Here was the paradox for leaders: While fostering smart collaboration, they had to maintain Dana-Farber’s entrepreneurial approach to research. And they faced big constraints. Because the researchers in question were members of the Harvard faculty, the Dana-Farber leaders couldn’t influence promotion criteria, nor could they reward people differentially through compensation.

So how do you jumpstart collaboration without transforming the pay or promotion system? The problem is that collaboration requires an investment. My analyses show that “smart collaboration” — that is, collaboration targeted at the right opportunities — nearly always pays out, but only after people spend time developing the underlying relationships and processes. Many people and companies start the investment, but quit before seeing the returns. Only if you stick with the effort through a long enough time frame can you expect the returns to become positive. This is how collaboration gets embedded as a normal way of working. But how to get through the pain barrier?

Jumpstarting collaboration

To foster collaboration, your initial hurdle is to capture people’s attention and give them the confidence to take some risks in order to make the initial investment. Costs naturally drop as people gain experience collaborating and develop the trusted relationships that smooth the process, but you should take steps to lower those costs more quickly. Likewise, your actions can make the benefits start to flow sooner. Both these efforts help the payback period arrive sooner, making collaboration a smarter investment for the next wave of people. Here are steps to keep in mind:

Pick your battles carefully. Make sure you’re focusing efforts to foster collaboration where it’s most needed: tackling complex problems that require the inputs of multiple specialized experts who couldn’t confront the issue without integrating their knowledge. If you’re operating in a highly individualistic culture, select a “coalition of the willing,” people who are favorably inclined to collaborate and won’t gripe to colleagues about a few hiccups while you build momentum.

Convince with quantitative evidence. Harness your internal sales data to show people that smart collaboration is not just a nice-to-have — it’s a strategic advantage for capturing market share. The bars in the chart below, for example, show how much your sales force increases revenue per client when people work across boundaries to sell multiple services. But the circles, which indicate how few clients are actually served by the full range, show how much upside potential still exists.

Drive down collaboration costs. Broker important relationships to help people build the necessary networks quickly. Use simple, off-the-shelf tools to make collaboration smoother. For example, make sure Skype and Dropbox or similar programs work with your IT system so that teammates can easily communicate and share documents. Pair a technology whiz with any employee who needs support with the tools; a personal relationship makes the uptake much likelier than expecting someone to learn on their own or to rely on the IT hotline. For major collaboration projects, Dana-Farber assigned coleaders who shouldered the administrative burdens while the superstar researcher provided the thought leadership. Take the heat of other short-term goals so that time spent collaborating feels like less of an opportunity cost.

Harness the power of competition. Publicize advances that people make collaboratively to stir up some constructive rivalry among peers. Set up contests and award small prizes for steps people take in the right direction, such as submitting joint sales plans rather than individual ones. Some companies now use gamification technology to engage employees in collaborative actions ranging from meeting new colleagues to completing team-based business goals.

Get the benefits flowing faster. Since the financial payout for collaboration can take a while, be sure to reward inputs while people are in the early stages of learning new collaborative processes. Dana-Farber evaluated scientists’ efforts at including experts from other disciplines as well as contributing to other researchers’ projects — and then recognized them again much later when those efforts turned into publications or successful grants. Make it easy for people to call out colleagues who helped them, and celebrate both the contributor and communicator. Let people directly reward each other. For example, have a stockpile of small gift cards that employees can access to thank each other for their collaborative efforts.

Dana-Farber ultimately succeeded in building 10 integrative research centers that bring together the world’s leading researchers to battle cancer in multidisciplinary ways that would be nearly impossible if each specialist was confined to their traditional silo. (You can read my deeper analysis of Dana-Farber here.) Business leaders, too, can harness the power of collaboration by taking some of these steps to sustain momentum until the rewards of collaboration consistently outweigh the costs.

]]>info@coachmatching.com (Heidi K. Gardner)LeadershipFri, 26 May 2017 15:28:17 +0200Women at the top still face prejudiceshttps://coachmatching.co.za/library/leadership/item/443-women-at-the-top-still-face-prejudices
https://coachmatching.co.za/library/leadership/item/443-women-at-the-top-still-face-prejudices

A new gender revolution is becoming the trending topic of this decade. After many predictions giving women hope that there is an end to the diminished value of women in leadership positions, the right of women to expect equal consideration for equal work is at the forefront of the new gender revolution.

According to Carol Sankar, founder of The Confidence Factor for Women in Leadership, the women’s movement must be a collective movement. It should not focus on the select few women to advance and enter the holy portals of the “club” while others are left behind. The restraining factors must be identified for these issues to be addressed in any meaningful

Women now make up nearly 60% of the graduates in the United States and more than 50% of the lecture classes in many traditionally male fields such as medicine and law. Despite these gains, equality has not been reached in business — especially at the most executive levels. Sally Blount, the only female heading up a “Top 10” business school says that past data predicts that at least 50% of women who graduate from top MBA programmes in 2017 will leave full-time work within 10 years of graduating — either by choice or because they have been “forced” out. If we understand why women of high potential choose not to enter business in the same numbers as their male peers and why those that do, leave at greater rates than men do, more insight is undoubtedly needed to create much-needed support programmes for women across all stages of their careers. This is urgent if we are not to continue to lose a large portion of employment potential. According to Sankar the main factors holding women back are:

• Self-bias: The belief that you are not qualified enough to try. • A seat at the table: Vacant seats at the table are often filled within the association and alignment of the male” club”— this can lead to the feeling that a seat at the table for women is a myth. • Competing instead of collaborating: Women who work together will win together. • Lack of mentorship and meaningful professional advocacy: The much-discussed importance of gaining access to professional mentor’s neglects to address the fear of seeking mentorship outside one’s comfort zone. • Loneliness: There is a high level of mistrust and gender bias between women affecting the value of professional relationships and advocacy. • Fear of asking: Women do not know what to ask for, who to ask and the appropriate time to ask. Equal consideration for equal effort must be rewarded not ignored.

However, to continue in their fight for equal rights, women need equal access.

A growing body of evidence suggests that there are three pivot points in a woman’s career at which she faces unique biological and cultural issues. These decision points introduce predictable stressors into the lives of adult women and mean that, on average, women of high potential with similar education and experience to high potential men experience goals, career choices and trade-offs differently. If we continue to overlook or only partially address these unique needs, large portions of highly talented women will never get near the C-suite.

Career launch

Data from elite institutions like North-Western, Princeton and Harvard indicate that women starting their careers earn on average about 80% of what their male peers do. Lack of parity appears right at the start of these women’s careers. How can we hope to achieve parity in the later stages?

A broad class of entry-level positions at consulting firms, investment banks and certain Fortune 500 companies offer upward mobility for leaders across all sectors. Women do not gain the benefit of these early career accelerators because they do not feel qualified enough to apply for them.

Young women tend to hold more negative stereotypes about working in business than do men. They encounter relatively few female role models who can demonstrate why working in business is a meaningful career choice.

Mid-career

The second critical pivot point occurs when women face greater demands at work at the same time as greater demands at home. Stress levels rise when aging relatives become frailer and children’s schedules more and more packed. Many well-educated career women decide at this stage that economically or emotionally it is just not worth it to stay in the game.

Part of the solutions clearly lies in our ability to improve the availability, affordability and quality of child and old-age care — as in the Scandinavian countries where this is the norm. Another part also relies on more flexible work hours and career paths.

High potential women need to be coached to prepare for and bridge the Mid-career years. They face the added issue of implicit and explicit bias at work — in ways that men still don’t see. Furthermore, because of this, they are less likely to ask for help or pursue new opportunities.

Executive transition

The shift from running a section of the organisation to running the whole of it, or being in the C-suite means more responsibility, more meetings, more travel, more politics and broader scope. Many women never make it past this hurdle — by choice or chance.

After years of sitting in limbo with no chance of filling the C-suite jobs, some women opt out by choice because the potential benefit no longer seems worth the personal cost.

Annual strategic talent reviews belong at the highest levels — a key aspect of best practice succession planning. They should include executives of diverse backgrounds, including women, and should not be delegated to Human Resources.

We must also recognise the unique challenges faced by professional women. If we can support them through the critical pivot points in their careers, the number of women in the

pipeline to the C-suite will increase. We may finally begin to realise our full potential as a society that espouses equal rights for all.

]]>info@coachmatching.com (Susi Astengo)LeadershipFri, 19 May 2017 09:22:47 +0200Being a Strategic Leader Is About Asking the Right Questionshttps://coachmatching.co.za/library/leadership/item/442-being-a-strategic-leader-is-about-asking-the-right-questions
https://coachmatching.co.za/library/leadership/item/442-being-a-strategic-leader-is-about-asking-the-right-questions

If you asked the world’s most successful business leaders what it means to “be strategic,” how many different answers do you think you’d get? Consider this number: 115,800,000. It’s the number of unique links returned when I searched online for “strategic leadership.”

There’s a good reason for all of those links: Strategy is complex. Thought leaders from all over the world have created sophisticated frameworks designed to help leaders grapple with their own strategies at an abstract level. But the reality is that strategy succeeds or fails based on how well leaders at every level of an organization integrate strategic thinking into day-to-day operations. This is less about complexity and more about practical focus.

How can you personally be more strategic as a leader? Consider asking yourself and your team the five questions below to drive clarity, alignment, and strategic insight. The questions build on one another, leading to a well-aligned, strategic perspective. If you make these five questions part of your ongoing dialog, you will inevitably become more strategic and more successful as a team.

1. What are we doing today?

Leaders are often surprised at just how much they don’t know about what team members are working on. Here’s why: Over time, organizations add more and more to the plates of various teams and employees. While leaders and team members talk at length about new initiatives and assignments, they focus less on legacy work that’s still being done. At some point leaders lose sight of just how much time people are investing in legacy priorities. Asking this question almost always brings to light significant work that managers aren’t aware is being done or that’s taking much more time than it should. You can’t move your team forward strategically without knowing the answer to this question with total clarity.

2. Why are you doing the work you’re doing? Why now?

Once you’ve taken stock of all the work being done by your team, the next logical step is to examine the importance of the work being done. This serves two strategic purposes. First, you gain clarity on what’s important and why it’s important from your team’s perspective. You’ll likely uncover situations where you and your team are uncertain or in disagreement. This drives important conversations with your team about choices, resources, and trade-offs. Second, you have the opportunity to attach value and meaning to the work being done by your team. Everyone wants to believe that the work they do matters. It’s your job to understand and articulate that with your own team and across the organization. The only way you get there is with scrutiny.

3. How does what we’re doing today align with the bigger picture?

Never underestimate the power of gaining total clarity about your own area of responsibility and then examining how well your work aligns with the broader goals of the organization. This is a discussion about gaps and outliers. If your team is working on something that doesn’t align with the broader purpose or goals of the organization, you have a responsibility to challenge the value of doing that work. This is true even if your team believes the work is important or meaningful. Does it bring value to your customers? Does it contribute to the highest priorities of the business? Work that benefits both your customers and your business should be the top priority. If you identify gaps not currently being addressed, more strategic discussion is needed. Are you doing exactly, and only, what most benefits your organization?

4. What does success look like for our team?

Chances are that you have a handful of measures that others use to evaluate your success. Do they tell the story of what success really looks like for your team? If you asked your team what success looks like for them individually and for the team overall, could they articulate an answer? The best strategic thinkers invest time here — not in trying to pacify their boss with a few measures that can readily be achieved, but in trying to understand what really drives success in terms of activities, behaviors, relationships, and strategic outcomes. The better you are able to align your team around a strong vision of success, the more likely you are to achieve it.

5. What else could we do to achieve more, better, faster?

Most leaders want to demonstrate their ability to “be strategic” by jumping directly to this question. If you haven’t done the work to answer the preceding questions, it almost doesn’t matter what you come up with here, because you may or may not be able to act on it. But if you do the work to answer the preceding questions, you are well positioned to be strategic in answering this one. You may identify new and better ways to serve the broader goals of your company. You may choose to redirect resources from current work that matters less in relative importance when compared to other new possibilities. This question is the most important of the five; every great leader needs to challenge their team to do more, better, or faster over time. It is, however, inextricably linked to the previous questions if you want to generate the best strategic insights.

The bottom line: Being a strategic leader is about asking the right questions and driving the right dialog with your team. In doing so, you raise the team’s collective ability to be strategic. The more competent you become in asking these questions, the better positioned you are to drive progress for your team and your organization.

Lisa Lai serves as an adviser, consultant, and coach for some of the world’s most successful leaders and companies. She is also a moderator of global leadership development programs for Harvard Business School Publishing. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, her Blog, or her website at www.laiventures.com.

In my college days I ranked among the top 10 women divers in the United States. I got that far not just because I worked hard — practicing every day in four-to-six-hour sessions — but also because I had an extremely tough coach who routinely offered both caring support and sharp criticism. Early in our relationship he explained how it would work: “When I stop yelling is when you’d better start to worry.” And I understood: Because he believed in me, he would push me — hard.

Strategies for coaching athletes don’t always work for executives trying to manage employees. But when it comes to delivering criticism, I do think some best practices translate. Used correctly, criticism can improve performance, enhance trust and respect, and advance the achievement of mutual goals. Used incorrectly, it can be toxic to a relationship.

How can you increase the likelihood that your employees will perceive the criticism you offer them as helpful and well-intended and be more willing to act on it, as I was with my diving coach? Based on my sports experience with him and my current work as an executive coach, I’ve developed four guidelines:

Engage the person in a specific solution. All too often managers offer criticism in general terms, leaving the receiver to guess what remedy is expected.

Good coaches are, by contrast, extremely specific: “Straighten your left leg” or “Be sure to spot the palm tree before you open your somersault tuck.” They encourage the athlete to problem-solve with them: “What felt off on that dive?” or “What could you do to get that leg straighter or start that twist earlier?”

Such an approach is equally effective in the workplace. Take, for example, the director of a large hospital who received complaints that a new manager was too abrupt in meetings and was failing to respond to requests in a timely fashion. Instead of taking the woman to task and explaining how she should change, the director explained the situation and asked her what might be done about it. She said, “It’s important for you to make good first impressions, but I’ve heard that some people think you’re too terse and not getting back to them quickly enough. How do you think you might change your behavior to shift those perceptions?” The manager suggested a few ideas and immediately implemented them.

Engaging employees in a specific solution ensures they’ll get it right next time, communicates respect for their opinions, and builds their confidence.

Link the criticism to what’s most important to the employee. My coach knew I wanted to please my parents. After all, they sacrificed a lot to allow me to pursue my dream of one day being in the Olympics. So, during diving workouts, if I was goofing off, all my coach had to say to get me focused was, “Do you think what you are doing right now is going to make your parents proud of you and get you into the Olympics?”

The same tactic can be used with employees. As an example, consider someone who cares about being respected by peers but is habitually 10 minutes late to weekly staff meetings and often blames her tardiness on her busy schedule. A manager might simply reprimand her — either nicely (“Please make more of an effort to be on time”) or sharply (“Do we need to get you a new watch?”). But a more effective strategy is to say something like: “How do you think coming in late affects your reputation with your colleagues?”

If employees see the link between the criticism and the things they care about personally, they’ll be more receptive to it.

Keep your voice and body language neutral. Coaches do yell sometimes; mine would bark at me from across the pool when I’d botched an easy dive. At times, managers can motivate with a raised voice and expressive gestures as well — to get across a we-can-do-better message.

But, ideally, workplace criticism is far more effective when delivered in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, with a relaxed facial expression and with neutral body language. That’s how the hospital director spoke to her new manager. (It’s also how my coach and I typically discussed how I could improve.)

An unemotional delivery sends a message that the criticism is simply part of doing business.

Heed individual preferences. My coach knew I liked to hear what he thought of each dive. I preferred that he be direct and to the point so that I had a clear understanding of what I needed to do differently.

Employees also have feedback preferences. One regional sales manager I know often accompanies her sales associates on client visits. Over time, she learned that some reps wanted her advice on their customer interactions immediately, while others preferred that she observe a day’s worth of calls and deliver comprehensive feedback the next morning at breakfast.

Early on, before your employees have a chance to do anything that requires criticism, ask them how they prefer to receive feedback. Should you give it immediately or postpone it to another time? Do they prefer an email or an in-person talk? If it’s the latter, should it be in your workspace, theirs, or a neutral spot?

A soon-to-be-published study conducted by the National Management Association and my firm found that 98% of managers believe it is important to be open and receptive to criticism, but that’s easier said than done. When bosses follow these guidelines, employees are much more likely to make good on the goal of welcoming negative feedback.

Deborah Bright is founder and president of Bright Enterprises, Inc., an executive coaching and training organization, and the author of six books, including The Truth Doesn’t Have to Hurt: How to Use Criticism to Strengthen Relationships, Improve Performance, and Promote Change